Oh god, jeez. watch this, chillax. It makes as much sense as all else.

I have thoughts on all this, you know, the whole of OWS, but I'll have to wait to tomorrow to add them to the conversation. I glossed over the last few posts (before dirt's {don't get all emo, comrade}, but his too. as soon as someone admits grammatical errors it signals logical errors as well. I'll never admit either).

There are strengths and weaknesses to a rhizomatic structure, and I for one am looking forward to what the next 24 hours brings. In the mean time here are 1 hour and 37 minutes that changed the world (37 hours, same thing);)

As my post above stated. It's not that I agree with conservatism, I just think it is a better tactic down the line to proving my point. Capitalism is now god in my eyes. It in it's pure essence fixes everything and all we need to do is create pure capitalism.

Posted by dirtBut wait, I need to stop talking because I make peoples eyes glaze over.

relax a little Bud, don't take my attempts to add some levity to an otherwise very serious and often boring conversation so personal.

We are the front-line workers who haul container rigs full of imported and exported goods to and from the docks and warehouses every day.

We have been elected by committees of our co-workers at the Ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach, Oakland, Seattle, Tacoma, New York and New Jersey to tell our collective story. We have accepted the honor to speak up for our brothers and sisters about our working conditions despite the risk of retaliation we face. One of us is a mother, the rest of us fathers. Between the five of us we have 11children and one more baby on the way. We have a combined 46 years of experience driving cargo from our shores for America’s stores.

We are inspired that a non-violent democratic movement that insists on basic economic fairness is capturing the hearts and minds of so many working people. Thank you “99 Percenters” for hearing our call for justice. We are humbled and overwhelmed by recent attention. Normally we are invisible.

Today’s demonstrations will impact us. While we cannot officially speak for every worker who shares our occupation, we can use this opportunity to reveal what it’s like to walk a day in our shoes for the 110,000 of us in America whose job it is to be a port truck driver. It may be tempting for media to ask questions about whether we support a shutdown, but there are no easy answers. Instead, we ask you, are you willing to listen and learn why a one-word response is impossible?

We love being behind the wheel. We are proud of the work we do to keep America’s economy moving. But we feel humiliated when we receive paychecks that suggest we work part time at a fast-food counter. Especially when we work an average of 60 or more hours a week, away from our families.

There is so much at stake in our industry. It is one of the nation’s most dangerous occupations. We don’t think truck driving should be a dead-end road in America. It should be a good job with a middle-class paycheck like it used to be decades ago.

We desperately want to drive clean and safe vehicles. Rigs that do not fill our lungs with deadly toxins, or dirty the air in the communities we haul in.

Poverty and pollution are like a plague at the ports. Our economic conditions are what led to the environmental crisis.

You, the public, have paid a severe price along with us.

Why? Just like Wall Street doesn’t have to abide by rules, our industry isn’t bound to regulation. So the market is run by con artists. The companies we work for call us independent contractors, as if we were our own bosses, but they boss us around. We receive Third World wages and drive sweatshops on wheels. We cannot negotiate our rates. (Usually we are not allowed to even see them.) We are paid by the load, not by the hour. So when we sit in those long lines at the terminals, or if we are stuck in traffic, we become volunteers who basically donate our time to the trucking and shipping companies. That’s the nice way to put it. We have all heard the words “modern-day slaves” at the lunch stops.

There are no restrooms for drivers. We keep empty bottles in our cabs. Plastic bags too. We feel like dogs. An Oakland driver was recently banned from the terminal because he was spied relieving himself behind a container. Neither the port, nor the terminal operators or anyone in the industry thinks it is their responsibility to provide humane and hygienic facilities for us. It is absolutely horrible for drivers who are women, who risk infection when they try to hold it until they can find a place to go.

The companies demand we cut corners to compete. It makes our roads less safe. When we try to blow the whistle about skipped inspections, faulty equipment, or falsified logs, then we are “starved out.” That means we are either fired outright, or more likely, we never get dispatched to haul a load again.

It may be difficult to comprehend the complex issues and nature of our employment. For us too. When businesses disguise workers like us as contractors, the Department of Labor calls it misclassification. We call it illegal. Those who profit from global trade and goods movement are getting away with it because everyone is doing it. One journalist took the time to talk to us this week and she explains it very well to outsiders. We hope you will read the enclosed article “How Goldman Sachs and Other Companies Exploit Port Truck Drivers.”

But the short answer to the question: Why are companies like SSA Marine, the Seattle-based global terminal operator that runs one of the West Coast’s major trucking carriers, Shippers’ Transport Express, doing this? Why would mega-rich Maersk, a huge Danish shipping and trucking conglomerate that wants to drill for more oil with Exxon Mobil in the Gulf Coast conduct business this way too?

To cheat on taxes, drive down business costs, and deny us the right to belong to a union, that’s why.

The typical arrangement works like this: Everything comes out of our pockets or is deducted from our paychecks. The truck or lease, fuel, insurance, registration, you name it. Our employers do not have to pay the costs of meeting emissions-compliant regulations; that is our financial burden to bear. Clean trucks cost about four to five times more than what we take home in a year. A few of us haul our company’s trucks for a tiny fraction of what the shippers pay per load instead of an hourly wage. They still call us independent owner-operators and give us a 1099 rather than a W-2.

We have never recovered from losing our basic rights as employees in America. Every year it literally goes from bad to worse to the unimaginable. We were ground zero for the government’s first major experiment into letting big business call the shots. Since it worked so well for the CEOs in transportation, why not the mortgage and banking industry too?

Even the few of us who are hired as legitimate employees are routinely denied our legal rights under this system. Just ask our co-workers who haul clothing brands like Guess?, Under Armour, and Ralph Lauren’s Polo. The carrier they work for in Los Angeles is called Toll Group and is headquartered in Australia. At the busiest time of the holiday shopping season, 26 drivers were axed after wearing Teamster T-shirts to work. They were protesting the lack of access to clean, indoor restrooms with running water. The company hired an anti-union consultant to intimidate the drivers. Down Under, the same company bargains with 12,000 of our counterparts in good faith.

Despite our great hardships, many of us cannot — or refuse to, as some of the most well-intentioned suggest — “just quit.” First, we want to work and do not have a safety net. Many of us are tied to one-sided leases. But more importantly, why should we have to leave? Truck driving is what we do, and we do it well.

We are the skilled, specially-licensed professionals who guarantee that Target, Best Buy, and Wal-Mart are all stocked with just-in-time delivery for consumers. Take a look at all the stuff in your house. The things you see advertised on TV. Chances are a port truck driver brought that special holiday gift to the store you bought it.

We would rather stick together and transform our industry from within. We deserve to be fairly rewarded and valued. That is why we have united to stage convoys, park our trucks, marched on the boss, and even shut down these ports.

The more underwater we are, the more our restlessness grows. We are being thoughtful about how best to organize ourselves and do what is needed to win dignity, respect, and justice.

Nowadays greedy corporations are treated as “people” while the politicians they bankroll cast union members who try to improve their workplaces as “thugs.”

But we believe in the power and potential behind a truly united 99%. We admire the strength and perseverance of the longshoremen. We are fighting like mad to overcome our exploitation, so please, stick by us long after December 12. Our friends in the Coalition for Clean & Safe Ports created a pledge you can sign to support us here.

We drivers have a saying, “We may not have a union yet, but no one can stop us from acting like one.”

The brothers and sisters of the Teamsters have our backs. They help us make our voices heard. But we need your help too so we can achieve the day where we raise our fists and together declare: “No one could stop us from forming a union.”

I am frankly past the point of being able to discern what exactly the goal of Occupy is, and I have really tried, so I quit. I hope you get what you wish for, whatever that is, if you are even sure what that is, and even though I suspect its not what I wish for. Immaterial really, and I will leave you with this. I believe it was Benjamin Disraeli that said, "We must be careful of what we wish for, and of defining our goals, because once on the back of the tiger, we cannot be sure of picking our place to dismount."

I have changed my personal exploring ethics code. From now on it will be: "Take only aimed shots, leave only hobo corpses." Copper scrappers, meth heads and homeless beware. The Jonsered cometh among you, bringing fear and dread.

Posted by JonseredI am frankly past the point of being able to discern what exactly the goal of Occupy is, and I have really tried, so I quit. I hope you get what you wish for, whatever that is, if you are even sure what that is, and even though I suspect its not what I wish for. Immaterial really, and I will leave you with this. I believe it was Benjamin Disraeli that said, "We must be careful of what we wish for, and of defining our goals, because once on the back of the tiger, we cannot be sure of picking our place to dismount."

Playing devils advocate here, as I no longer believe in progress. But when has any revolution turned into what the original visionaries imagined? As the saying goes "Shoot for the stars and you just might hit the moon".

As far as what the goals are as far as the ports go: We are there in support of our community. The Longshoremen have been fighting EGT for a while now. We came and gave our numbers. We also shut them down in support of the truckers, who are not allowed to unionize at the risk of their jobs.

He seemed to move among very delicate objects, on ground mined with goodness knows what precious explosives. ~ Jean Cocteau

Posted by SpeedEvery time someone criticizes the the radical or outlandish talk of an OWS protester the scripted reply is "Its silly of you to think that persons views represents all of OWS"

Using that logic one can pretty safely say the 5 signers of this open letter don't represent ALL port drivers.

Speed, do you really think that there are drivers who prefer to pee in a bottle rather than a toilet? Sure, all the drivers may not agree on all the details, but I suspect they all favor better working conditions. And any boss who says that putting a porta-potty in would cause them to go out of business is simply full of shit.

At first I thought that Occupy wasn't gaining any allies by shutting down the port, but after reading that letter, I changed my mind. Next they ought to try what some jokers did in San Francisco during the first Gulf War. Someone put signs up all over the Bay Area saying there was a general strike on such and such a date, and listed a bunch of local celebrities who supported it. None of them did, of course, but the local media contacted them all asking them about it and thus put the idea of a general strike into the general consciousness.

Everyone knows the same truth and our lives consist of how we choose to distort it.

Every time someone criticizes the the radical or outlandish talk of an OWS protester the scripted reply is "Its silly of you to think that persons views represents all of OWS"

Using that logic one can pretty safely say the 5 signers of this open letter don't represent ALL port drivers.

So the five truckers Long Beach, Washington, Los Angeles, Oakland and New York & New Jersey... You guys really think they only represent themselves? If more signatures at the bottom is all it takes to convince you that Occupy is more than a couple dozen unwashed and unemployed, I'm sure there are 1000s of petitions circulated throughout October and November one could dig up that clearly display more than five names.

But yeah, you guys can go on believing that Occupy has no support, aside from five random truckers.

You right wing fellas would never say anything "radical or outlandish" on behalf of "the man" whose money is 'messed with,' the majority you seem to want to represent, right?

The only men who had their money fucked with during the occupation of West Coast ports certainly don't drive trucks.